Today’s News & Commentary — July 16, 2018

Workers from the D.C. Metro system’s largest union voted to authorize a strike yesterday, the Washington Post reports. Union members approved the potential strike by a 94 percent margin. Union leaders have yet to say whether they will go forward with the strike now that they have authorization. The strike would significantly disrupt a transit system that serves about 1 million people a day.

Tesla employees say they were ordered to walk through raw sewage in order to meet their production goals, Bloomberg reports. Dennis Duran, who works in Tesla’s paint shop at the company’s Fremont factory, says that raw sewage spilled onto to the floor and he and several colleagues were told to walk through it to “keep the line moving.” Duran supports unionization efforts at the car manufacturer. The Fremont factory is under three separate open investigations by California’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health.

European Amazon workers have walked off the job to protest the company’s tough working conditions, Forbes reports. Amazon workers in Italy, France, England, Germany and Poland have all joined the walkout, which started on Tuesday in Spain. The walkout came in anticipation of today, known as “Prime Day,” one of the Amazon’s highest volume days of the year. Online workers, gamers, and shoppers plan to boycott Amazon today in solidarity with the striking workers.

Employees at Deloitte are calling for their company to stop providing consulting services to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the New York Times reports. A petition circulated by Deloitte employees asks the company’s chief executive, Cathy Engelbert, to end all contracts with both ICE and United States Customs and Border Protection. The document also calls on Engelbert to publicly denounce the Trump Administration policy of separating migrant children from their parents. The news comes just after the consulting giant’s competitor, McKinsey & Company, cut its own contracts with ICE.

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About OnLabor

OnLabor is a blog dev­oted to workers, unions, and their politics. We in­ter­pret our sub­ject broadly to in­clude the cur­rent cri­sis in the tra­di­tional union move­ment (why union de­cline is hap­pen­ing and what it means for our so­ci­ety); the new and con­tested forms of worker or­ga­ni­za­tion that are fill­ing the la­bor union gap; how work ought to be struc­tured and man­aged; how work­ers ought to be rep­re­sented and com­pen­sated; and the ap­pro­pri­ate role of gov­ern­ment – all three branches – in each of these is­sues.